One of the earliest practitioners of our race was Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte of the Omaha tribe. Having prepared at Hampton Institute and elsewhere, she entered the Philadelphia Medical College for Women. When she had finished, she returned to her tribe, and was for some time in the Government service. She has since taken up private practice and also had charge of a mission hospital. Dr. Picotte is a sister of Bright Eyes (Susette La Flesche) and also of Francis La Flesche of Washington, D. C. There is another Indian doctor, not of full blood, who is president of the City Club of Chicago and active in civic reform. In several Middle Western cities there are successful doctors and dentists of my race.
In the profession of law we have none of full blood whose fame is national. Judge Hiram Chase of the Omahas and others have won local distinction. The Hon. Charles Curtis, Senator from Kansas, was a successful lawyer in Topeka when he was elected to the House of Representatives, and later to the United States Senate. His mother is a Kaw Indian. Mr. Curtis was and is a leader of the Republican party in his state. Senator Owen of Oklahoma is part Cherokee. The whole country has come to realize his ability and influence. Representative Carter of Oklahoma is also an Indian.
During my student days in New Hampshire I was often told that Daniel Webster was part Indian on his mother's side. Certainly his physiognomy as well as his unequalled logic corroborated the story. We all know that governors and other men of mark have proclaimed themselves descendants of Pocahontas; I have met several in the West and South. I know that the late Senators Quay of Pennsylvania and Morgan of Alabama had some Indian blood, for they themselves told me so; and I have been told the same of Senators Clapp and La Follette, but have never verified it. Their wonderful aggressiveness and dauntless public service in my mind point to native descent, and if they can truthfully claim it I feel sure that they will be proud to do so. They must know that many distinguished army officers as well as traders and explorers left sons and daughters among the American tribes, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century. As late as 1876 Dr. Washington Mathews, a surgeon in the United States Army, brought down on a Missouri River steamboat a Gros Ventre son, and left him with the missionary teacher, Dr. Alfred L. Riggs, to rear and educate. This military surgeon and scientist not only attained the rank of major-general, but he became one of our foremost archæologists. The boy was called Berthold, from the place of his birth. He was afterward sent to Yankton College, but I do not know what became of him. As for those brilliant men, so many in number, who have the blood of both races in their veins, I will not pretend to claim for the Indian all the credit of their talents and energy.
In the ministry we have many able and devoted men—more than in any other profession. The Presbyterian Church alone has thirty-eight and the Episcopal Church about twenty, with a less number in several other denominations, and two Roman Catholic priests. Most of these labor among their own people, though the Rev. Frank Wright, a Choctaw, is well known as an evangelistic preacher and singer.
One of our best-known clergymen is Rev. Sherman Coolidge, a full-blood Arapahoe. He has had an unusual career, having been taken prisoner as a boy by an officer of the army. He was sent to school and eventually graduated from Bishop Whipple's Seabury Divinity School at Faribault, Minn. Since that time Doctor Coolidge has devoted himself to the Christianization of his race. He is the president of our recently organized Society of American Indians.
Bishop Whipple developed many able preachers, of whom perhaps the most accomplished was the Rev. Charles Smith Cook, of the Yankton Sioux. He was the son of a Sioux woman and a military officer. Mr. Cook was graduated from Trinity College, Hartford, and later from Seabury Divinity School. He had unusual eloquence and personal charm, and became at once one of Bishop Hare's ablest helpers in his great work among the Sioux. Stationed at Pine Ridge at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre, he opened his church to the wounded Indian prisoners as an emergency hospital. His much regretted death occurred a few months later. He was a tireless worker and much loved by his people.
One of our promising young ministers is the Rev. Henry Roe Cloud, a Winnebago, graduated from Yale and Oberlin. Stephen Jones, a Sioux, who was graduated from the Y. M. C. A. training-school at Springfield, Mass., has done good work as field secretary among the Indians for a number of years. I should add that there are many ministers of my race who have no college degree nor much education in the English language, yet who are among our most able and influential leaders. My own brother, Rev. John Eastman, who passed but a short time in school, has not only been a successful preacher among the Sioux but for many years their trusted adviser and representative to look after their interests at the national capital.
A few men and many women have succeeded in the teaching profession, most of them in the United States Indian Service. It is the express policy of the Government to use the educated Indians, whenever possible, in promoting the advancement of their race; indeed some of the treaties include this stipulation. Therefore preference is given them by the Indian Bureau, and although they must pass a civil-service examination to prove their fitness, such examination, in their case, is non-competitive. They have been prepared in the larger Government schools, in many instances with the addition of normal and college courses. At least two are superintendents of schools. A number of young women, Carlisle graduates, have taken up trained nursing as a profession, and are practising successfully both among whites and Indians.
In the sciences, especially in ethnology and archæology, we have several who have rendered material service. William Jones, a Sac and Fox quarter blood, was a graduate of Hampton and of Harvard University. He took post-graduate work at Columbia, and was a pupil of those distinguished scientists, Dr. Putnam and Dr. Boas. The latter has called him one of our ablest archæologists. Dr. Jones travelled among the various tribes, even to the coast of Labrador, and labored assiduously in the cause of science for Harvard and the Marshall Field Museum of Chicago, as well as other institutions. It was the Chicago Museum which sent him to the Philippine Islands, where he was murdered by the natives a few years ago.
We have also such men as Professor Hewitt of the Smithsonian Institution, Francis La Flesche of the same, and Arthur C. Parker of Albany, N. Y., who is state archæologist.